a writer or not, that is the question?

Writing and the purpose are not the easiest things to resolve sometimes. Do you write because you love to write, or do you write to be read? If it is the first then it does not matter who reads you – if you do it for the latter and then no one reads you is that a problem?

The means to produce and distribute irrespective of whether or not you have an audience are there, and seem set to remain there for the forseeable future. So what is a writer that no one reads? I read a post that tried to convince me that unread words mean something, and with the reams of unread writing that I have this is a comforting thought. For a while – but then if you really drill down into the reason behind words and stories, you are looking to communicate – you love to communicate and that is why you write, and why you may continue to write with no readers, because the idea is still alive that someone might read it some day, but when you tell someone else that you write and they see how few people you write for, they are going to present you with a difficult why again.

I know some people read my stuff – I see the stats. So what is the issue? The volume? The desire to translate readers of something free into readers of something they would pay for? It is another layer of complication. It is a different metric by which to measure your success. People read my free writing, but don’t want to invest in my book. It starts to stratify the relationship you have with readers. Or does it? What does it boil down to really?

Yes – again it is really about the quality of the communication. Money represents investment in finding out what you have to say. Reading you is an investment of time, and is valuable in its own way. Money means you can invest more time in writing. A crisis in confidence in regards to your writing can often be entirely explained by a feeling that you are not communicating – that you are not producing the desired effect; that what you have turned out is an overt product, in that no one wants to read it. It is a product that does not communicate. You write to communicate. If you don’t communicate are you a writer? If you don’t communicate, should you write?

Even in a working blog should you express these kinds of insecurity? Does that not scream louder than you work seems to? Is it a cry for help? Is it a pity party? Is it an admission of defeat? The irony may be that it communicates and in some impoverished sense it makes you more of a writer than your work which you really feel invested in ever will. What a conundrum, hey?

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